Friday, January 6, 2017

Divorce and social disruption

Up to three in ten pensioners are refusing to leave everything to their children when they die over fears it will either be squandered or lost in divorce, a survey shows. Instead, many are leaving assets to grandchildren or handing them down to their offspring in smaller packages over the years so it does not go all at once.

It found 30 per cent of parents are unwilling to leave money to their married children, mainly through fears half of it would be lost in divorce.

It is ridiculous that inheritance money is included in the pool of marital assets that are split. One certain way of protecting it is to keep it out of the hands of the child about to get married.

19 comments:

This has long been a concern, certainly since I started practicing in the early eighties. Then, the fear was death of a child, with inherited assets going to the spouse, but also divorce. I'm sure that divorce rates and a more general knowledge of horror stories has exacerbated the concern. Unless it's changed recently, in NJ inherited assets are not part of the marital estate IF kept separate, ie. if you deposit them into a joint account, they are then marital assets. Community property states are probably different.

Pfft. A simple trust can be set up so that the assets stay in the trust after granny dies, and trustees are limited to only those who are related to granny by blood or legal adoption. Walling off spouses from trust assets is one of the features of a trust, and given the low cost of establishing one, only the ignorant skip it.

Sadly, most attorneys don't see to grasp this. It simply doesn't occur to people that the Really Big Money Dynasties have used trusts for centuries to protect the dynastic assets from creditors, gold-diggers and other assorted filth.

If you have a "living" (AKA grantor) trust, and you title everything you own into that trust, when you die, the trust gets its own tax ID number. Even your house can stay in the trust, or your grandkids (trustees) can use trust assets to buy a home (which they then rent from the trust, just like normal renters, except they're paying into the trust which is really just their money anyway.) In this way, say Johnny Grandkid marries a BPD bitch. They live in a house owned by the Dead Granny Trust. She frivorces him, but she gets NOT ONE IOTA of the house. They didn't own it. The trust did, and she has no ownership (or even trustee) interest in the trust. The more wealth held (and kept) in the trust, the less property at risk of a divorce settlement or some lawsuit-happy clown.

Something I've seen: Wife has affair. Gets divorced. Gets the house, the kids, and the cash. Gets married to her affair partner. Gets herself killed on affair partner's motorcycle. Affair partner, now husband, is the proud owner of the house and inherits all her money and life insurance. Kids shipped back to live with dad, who has only been able to afford an apartment after he was taken to the cleaners.

I cannot elaborate on what others have said except to say if your spouse pressures you into commingling assets, divorce her immediately. She's having an affair and wants to split. Happened to my brother (he agreed to do it) and his lawyer had to go back and show she checked out of the marriage through the affair before pressuring him so the judge sided with my brother. But it was close.

FYI Bank of America is not interested in administering trusts holding less than five million dollars. Small local banks used to do trusts, but when "too big to fail" came along in the 1980s, they all merged with Bank of America.

Inheritances aren't technically a part of marital assets as long as you keep them separate and they aren't actively managed. For example, mom & dad leave you $1 million dollars, you buy a house move your family in, and by a car, and stick the rest in a joint brokerage account. Judge will split that up however he feels the ex-wife is entitled to cash prizes.

If mom & dad leave you $1 million and you keep it separate named account and don't actively manage it while only using the annual income to supplement the family then at divorce the analysis is different. The Judge will still screw you over, but he can't split that asset. Lets say the marital assets are worth $100k, and your inheritance is a separate $1 million. The Judge will grant the ex-wife the full $100k marital assets. The Judge also can't give her alimony from the inheritance, but he can award child support from it which as most people around here is a backdoor for alimony.

Anyway, if boomers hadn't raised such BSC daughters perhaps they would be less concerned about their sons getting divorce raped.

Pre-nups are next to worthless. All a frivorcing woman has to do is foster the belief that she was "pressured" into signing it and viola, instant invalidation. There's also another easy win in modern family law courts: "it cannot in any way modify the child support obligations that either spouse would have if the marriage should end in divorce."

@dc.sunsets - Speaking of "family pressure", is it possibly for BPD wife to be made a trustee? I mean the dupe married her, so he's already suspect. Is there any legal obstacle to her getting her grimy mitts on Granny's trust?

Pre-nups are next to worthless. All a frivorcing woman has to do is foster the belief that she was "pressured" into signing it and viola, instant invalidation.

She doesn't even need to go that far. Where I live it's pretty common for judges to void prenups because they aren't "fair". I get there needs to be a clause in the law such that the judge can protect women who are too stupid to understand what they're signing from being out on the street. But in practice if your prenup does anything more than leave the premarital assets with the spouse that brought them into the marriage, which happens anyway by default, it's going to get thrown out.

I'm with dc.sunsets- trusts are the way to go. We set up a trust before we had our first child and we have control over everything. If something happens to me or my husband we know the kids are taken care of. If one of us dies and the other remarries the new spouse gets nothing.

I read about a case where a woman divorced her husband, got his family's property (been in the family for generations) and was seeking to turn it into a bed and breakfast, but not before having the graves of her ex husband's family removed from the site.

@dc.sunsets - Speaking of "family pressure", is it possibly for BPD wife to be made a trustee? I mean the dupe married her, so he's already suspect. Is there any legal obstacle to her getting her grimy mitts on Granny's trust?

Nothing, I mean NOTHING can prevent a fool descendant (including your own kid) from ruining your wisely laid plan. Like marrying the wrong person, there is no fix for raising kids who don't understand (and adopt) your principles. All the trust offers is a legal tool for your descendants to use, it can't fix stupid.

The #1 risk is some bone head pulling wealth out of the trust's ownership. BPD wife could easily manipulate any dick without a brain.

One of the keys to dynastic wealth must be a mechanism for successor trustees to cull out dissipative or just plain stupid family members who must be excised from the core system (by preventing their becoming trustees.) That concept is way beyond my grasp of trusts & their intended purposes.

A trust is useful, but Job One is having a coherent set of life's principles & axioms and successfully teaching them to your kids.

I get there needs to be a clause in the law such that the judge can protect women who are too stupid to understand what they're signing from being out on the street.

Thats how it starts brother. Next thing you know some spindly faggot is harranguing you over why you wont have compassion on the doe eyed little slut over her "one mistake" in running a train with the entire local hs football team.

Either princess has no agency in which case she must be under the control of a legal guardian, or she has agency, in which case she can go cry in her beer and her example will serve as a warning to the rest of the little angels.

Im sorry, but unless we rein in our masculine compassion, we will end up burning this place to the ground.

"Im sorry, but unless we rein in our masculine compassion, we will end up burning this place to the ground."

IMHO, the process of reining in compassion is well underway (this blog's, among many others' existence as evidence) and the coming phase change will see compassion evaporate like water in the Sahara Desert.

dc.sunsets said...Sadly, most attorneys don't see to grasp this. It simply doesn't occur to people that the Really Big Money Dynasties have used trusts for centuries to protect the dynastic assets from creditors, gold-diggers and other assorted filth.January 6, 2017 at 5:33 AM

Attorneys grasp it, they just don't want trusts. You can't collect fees from money you can't redistribute and litigate over.